Wishing won't make it so

ABC's Fantasy Island and Cupid are tantalizing disappointments

by Robert David Sullivan

Alyssa Milano is in the middle of an epiphany on Fantasy Island (Saturdays at 9 p.m. on ABC). She's realizing that there's no place like home, or it pays to use the Discover Card, or something like that, but I can't pay attention because my own fantasy keeps getting in the way: I get a call from the president of ABC, who pleads with me, "We'll do anything you say. Just tell us how to save this show!"

Like prime-time television in general, Fantasy Island and the romance drama Cupid (Saturdays at 10 p.m. on ABC) are worth saving but not really worth watching. Well, not yet, anyway. Both have clever premises, interesting lead actors, and sharp visual styles, but these qualities are enough to sustain a commercial, not a weekly series. In fact, the first few episodes of each have been about as deep as the "bumpers" that are now used in the commercial breaks on all ABC series -- those split-screen snippets of film with a cute slogan on one side and stills from the show that you're watching on the other half. Fantasy and Cupid promise inventiveness but fall back on the safe storylines and casting that now send viewers fleeing to lightweight cable shows like South Park. (Shortly before press time, ABC renewed Cupid for the rest of the season, but Fantasy Island's future remains uncertain. Both series are doing poorly in the ratings overall but are more popular among young-adult viewers.)

Fantasy Island, of course, is a remake of the cotton-candy ABC series that ran from 1978 to 1984, in which Ricardo Montalban's mysterious Mr. Roarke granted boring wishes to shallow characters played by second-tier TV actors. Despite this pedigree, there's nothing inherently wrong with the show's format (plenty of fine Twilight Zone episodes could have been dropped into it), and this year's remake was promised to be much darker than the 1970s version. One of the executive producers, after all, is Addams Family director Barry Sonnenfeld. It certainly looks better; the cloudless sky over Roarke's pristine tropical island is somehow more disturbing than inviting. We can imagine our host stepping outside after breakfast to exclaim, "Ah, another damned beautiful day!"

In a sly bit of casting, Roarke is now played by Malcolm McDowell, who's best known for such unsettling films as A Clockwork Orange and the orgy epic Caligula -- not that his experience with sexual fantasies will ever be put to use on this G-rated island. Sonnenfeld has described McDowell's Roarke as "the devil's helper," with "a sort of danger about him." But so far, Roarke has terrorized only his staff, who are imprisoned on the island for reasons unknown. Whenever he snarls at a guest, you can bet that he's using a tough-love strategy to teach some moral lesson. ("You are spectacular as Dyno Man," he tells a guy trying to impress his son by becoming a superhero, "but woefully inadequate as a father.") The central flaw in both versions of Fantasy Island is that we're meant to identify with the guests, and either ABC or the show's producers have decided that we're too squeamish to see them humiliated. I, for one, would rather see the Fantasy guests subjected to John Cleese's venomous hotel manager from Fawlty Towers.

The new version does have one marvelously clever feature. Each episode begins in a dusty travel agency run by old-timers Fyvush Finkel (the brash lawyer from Picket Fences) and Sylvia Sydney, who chain-smokes and basically reprises her role from the film Beetlejuice. Guest stars stumble into this travel agency (to get out of the rain, make a phone call, etc.) and Finkel cajoles them into taking a vacation to you-know-where.

These scenes are far too short. Just as some of the best moments on NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Street are the conversations that cops have on their way to a crime scene, Fantasy Island should hook us by having each customer talk about his or her frustrations and desires, with periodic interruptions by the sardonic Finkel and Sydney. I can think of three reasons why this doesn't happen. First, someone would have to write interesting dialogue, and this is an increasingly scarce resource across the entire prime-time schedule. Second, most of the guest stars on Fantasy Island are vacant-looking cover models who have turned to acting because waiting tables is beyond their powers of concentration. The rest, like NYPD Blue's James McDaniel, are competent actors who seem intensely embarrassed to be on the show. Finally, the fantasies are just as lame as they were in the '70s version. A woman wants to turn a platonic relationship into a love affair; a man wants to learn a technique for picking up women. No one seems at all interested in money or power.

Fantasy Island has a veneer of hipness, but once past the opening credits it does nothing but try to flatter its audience. In one episode, some jerk out of a Mountain Dew commercial leaves his pregnant wife back on the mainland so that he can indulge in an "extreme sports" fantasy. He falls off a mountain and apparently dies, but Roarke takes pity and resurrects him, explaining that "the most extreme game of all" would be to watch his wife as she gives birth. Roarke goes on to tell all of us sedentary viewers how brave it is to attend weddings and funerals, too. Mr. Mountain Dew vows to find the courage to spend more time at home with his wife. And I am moved to drop my pants and push my cheeks against the TV screen so that it can better kiss my ass.

The presence of Beetlejuice's Sydney raises the intriguing possibility that the visitors to Fantasy Island have actually cashed in their last frequent-flier miles and are on their way to the hereafter. That would explain why the place remains a secret to the outside world (please don't give Geraldo Rivera a guest shot as a sleazy reporter trying to prove the island's existence). And it could make all the show's variations on It's a Wonderful Life more bearable: you die, you wish you did something in your life differently, Roarke shows you how things would have been worse if you got your wish, and you're able to go to the great beyond with a clear conscience.

At least one story-line (there are two or three per episode) fits this interpretation. The daughter of a military veteran wants a taste of real combat, so Roarke puts her in the middle of World War II. She's killed while trying to save a comrade, and we next see Roarke standing at her grave. He explains to one of his assistants that the woman was already dying from breast cancer when she arrived at the island, and that her actual fantasy was a more heroic demise. That's a twist worthy of The Twilight Zone, but by this point the story has already been ruined by the cute gimmick of making all the soldiers women who talk about protecting the weaker sex back home. "You've got the guts to be a woman," one soldier tells her wounded buddy, and Fantasy Island gives another wet one to at least half of its viewers.

CUPID features Jeremy Piven (formerly of Ellen) as a smooth-talking bartender named Trevor who claims to be the goddess of love, imprisoned in a mortal's body until he can match up 100 couples in Chicago without the use of magic. Like Fantasy Island and countless other series, Cupid supposedly appeals to our appetite for the mystical, but it's terrified of ambiguity. And so we get thudding hints that Trevor really is Cupid, which takes a lot of fun out of the show.

"Mortality must be so hard," he says in one episode, and the line comes off as, yes, another way to suck up to all the mortals watching at home. (If we could suspect that Piven's character is mortal himself, the same line might be poignant.) Piven is physically attractive, and he's got a good sense of timing when trading wisecracks with his state-appointed shrink (Paula Marshall), but his unrelenting cockiness gets tiresome after a while. Dispensing cool advice to all the nerds in a singles group, he comes off as the reincarnation of another '70s TV icon: the leather-jacketed Fonzie, from the sit-com Happy Days.

Still, Cupid is the more polished of ABC's Saturday-night offerings. Piven and Marshall have a running argument over the best method to find a mate -- Trevor advocates love at first sight while the shrink says it's better to work from a wish list of desirable qualities -- and their conversations are almost provocative. A Halloween episode mostly set at a downtown disco has a clever subplot in which Trevor gets his nerdy entourage onto the dance floor by promising to reward the guy who racks up the most rejections from women (naturally, all of them eventually hit upon a pick-up line that works).

The show comes close to capturing the rootlessness of single life in big-city America, but just as on Fantasy Island, there's no depth to the characters who drop in for guidance from our mysterious host. How, for example, can we tell that they're lonely when we don't see how they act when they're alone? And quirkiness often overwhelms the more authentic elements of the show, as when a first-time visitor to the singles group announces to the crowd that he's still a virgin in his mid 30s. Cupid may yet find the balance of whimsy and realism that marks the better episodes of Northern Exposure and Ally McBeal, but viewers may not be patient enough to wait.

That I haven't given up on Fantasy Island and Cupid is a testament to how dismal this TV season has become. I suspect that ABC will eventually decide the problem is with the concepts rather than the execution, and this pair will be replaced by equally underwritten shows (or scriptless programs like America's Funniest Home Videos). Whereupon Fantasy Island and Cupid will join the rapidly growing list of broadcast-network series that we wish had been produced by HBO.